Laws of Physics
by QwertyTheBard
Summary: When the Doctor comes to Bixby, Oklahoma, to find out why seventeen people went missing in one night, he gets into more trouble than he bargained for, possibly more than he can handle. This town won't give up its secrets so easily...
1. Unless Acted Upon by an Outside Force

A/N: Okay, so, I realize this is a very odd crossover between two fandoms that rarely intersect. Midnighters is a somewhat obscure book series by an amazing author about a small town in Oklahoma, and Doctor Who is a legendary British sci-fi TV series that is lesser-known (okay, so its popularity is gradually snowballing over here, whatever) in the US. Suffice to say, if you've read/watched one but not the other, you probably should. They're both amazing. I'll try to write this so that if you haven't experienced one side of the crossover, you can still have fun trying to figure the other side out. If, by chance, you're one of those amazing people that's familiar with both series, I hope you'll enjoy this all the more for it.

Also, this particular fic features the Tenth Doctor. I do realize we're on Eleven now, but Ten seemed to fit the story better. This takes place between Waters of Mars and The End of Time on the Doctor's side; it's post-series for the Midnighters, but with Melissa and Jonathan deciding to finish out the school year in Bixby before going on their road trip (because Melissa didn't suffer through those first three years to not get a diploma.)

So, without further blabbering on my part, Allons-y!

* * *

"Physics," he said, writing it so that it dominated the whiteboard, all caps, underlined. "Physics, physics…. Physics. I hope you're all getting this down." Most of the students immediately started scrambling for their supplies. Jonathan simply tipped back his chair, one foot on the front of the desk. The new guy looked fresh out of college, second or third year teaching at best. A bit eccentric, which was always fun with teachers, and a generic name, to boot. Honestly, who names their kid John Smith?

Over Christmas break, their old physics teacher had finally had her baby. It had gotten old, her obsessive ultra-sound showing, odd cravings, and general hormonal grumpiness. This guy, on the other hand, looked like he would either know what he was doing, and do it in an entertaining way, or would blunder through the first few months and finally get a handle on things mere weeks before the end of the year, when it didn't matter anyway.

"Well…." He said, long and drawn out, "They really gave me no clue how much you guys know, so I'm gonna ask a few questions. Two identical strips of nylon are charged with static electricity and hung from a string so they can swing freely. What would happen if they were brought near each other?"

Jonathan sat up. The new guy wasn't reading from any kind of book. He was coming up with his questions off the top of his head, which meant he _did_ know what he was doing. Of course, Jonathan knew the answer, but he knew that everyone else in the class _should_ know this one, so he kept quiet.

"Anyone? No?" Looked like it was up to him, then. Pretty sad.

"They'd repel each other," he said, trying to sound bored.

"Yup. Can you tell me why, um… what's your name?"

"Jonathan Martinez. And it's cause they have the same charge."

"Molto Bene," he said. Apparently, he didn't realize that Bixby High only taught Spanish and French. He was pacing in front of his new desk, and eventually settled for sitting on top of it. "Now then. A car accelerates on an asphalt road. What force is moving the car? Someone other than Jonathan, please?"

Ashley, a mousy, small kid who had skipped a grade five years ago, raised her hand tentatively. "Yes? You, in the back?"

"The friction between the road and the tires."

"Good. Now, when you flip a coin, does it stop at the top of its arc before it comes back down?"

Jonathan choked on nothing. That was…

The classroom felt mind-gratingly empty without Jessica there to exchange their little look, the secret inside joke that no one else had ever picked up on, about that question. Thing is, their old teacher had mentioned enough that the class had come to expect the answer to come from him. It was a running gag in more ways than one, but this was the first time it had been mentioned since Halloween.

The class stared at him expectantly. It made Jonathan sick. The teacher raised his eyebrows.

Jonathan took a deep breath, swallowed, and somehow managed to say "No," without having a complete breakdown.

"Why?" the teacher persisted.

"Because," he swallowed again, "Because we're on the earth, which is orbiting the sun, which is hurtling through space at eight thousand some miles per minute. Aside from that, the coin is spinning on its own axis and more than likely traveling in an arc." He sat back and sighed. Thankfully, the answer had been said enough that it was still automatic, even after all this time. The new guy looked confused for a moment, raising an eyebrow at him for a second before moving on.

The rest of the class went as usual for the first day after Christmas break: not much learning, discussion of who did what over their respective "Vacations". The new guy turned out to be good with names. People started laughing, talking loudly, about just about anything, relating to physics or not. Contrary to the average teacher, though, who would either try to control the class or hunch over their latest lesson plan on their mandatory school OS desktop, Mr. Smith was in the middle of it all, still perched on the front desk. He talked to them like people, which was refreshing, but expected of a teacher his age.

And for the last twenty minutes of physics, for the first time since October, Flatland got a little closer to being three-dimensional.

* * *

Mr. Smith caught up to him next to his locker after class. He was leaning against the one next to Jonathan's casually, hands in his pockets, giving Jonathan the raised eyebrow as he loaded up his backpack. Jonathan shut his locker and returned the look, making the middle-of-the-year replacement look up. Honestly, the guy acted more like a student than a teacher.

"Can I have a word with you, Jonathan? That is, unless you have a bus to catch or something." Jonathan nodded, confused. It was only the first day back from Christmas break, he couldn't have screwed up anything yet…

"What for?" He decided to ask. Mr. Smith was already leading the way down the hall, Jonathan on his heels. The teacher stopped in the doorway to his room, as if he couldn't talk if he didn't have something to lean against.

"It's about Jessica Day." Jonathan's throat went dry. Why the hell was this new guy, a teacher, a daylighter, a _flatlander_, suddenly curious about Jessica? It was bad enough that he only got to see her an hour a day. "She went missing around Halloween, right? Weren't you her boyfriend?"

"She… she's not the only one, you know. I mean, you heard about what happened this Halloween, right?"

Smith hesitated, then nodded. "Yeah, there were seventeen others missing, one of them found dead. It doesn't make any sense with the story that was in the news."

"So why single out Jessica?" Jonathan asked. He got the sneaking suspicion that Mr. Smith knew more than he should, and was going to try to figure out just how much the guy was sure of. But just as Mr. Smith was opening his mouth to answer, Jonathan caught a glimpse of something black, just barely inside his field of vision. The kind of black that only existed when the rest of the world was blue. He turned to face it.

It meowed. It looked close enough to a regular black cat, but somehow seemed much more predatory. And it was waltzing right up to them, in the middle of a hallway full of fluorescent lighting and steel lockers, in broad daylight. By all logic, it was just a normal cat, but instinct told Jonathan otherwise.

Mr. Smith was no where near as concerned. He cheerfully squatted down in front of the creature and held out a hand, inviting it to rub up against him. He muttered to it, asking it how it'd got in here almost like he expected it to answer. Every time he tried to touch it, though, it shied away. Jonathan caught a glimpse of its eyes for a split second, but that was all he needed to make his decision.

"Indescribable." The cat's hair raised, and Mr. Smith gave Jonathan an odd sort of look. "Thought so," Jonathan muttered. "Disproportion." Mr. Smith stood up when the cat started hissing and spitting. "Revolutionary Determination." The cat turned tail and ran.

It took a few seconds for Jonathan to realize his teacher was staring at him.

"What was that all about?"

Mr. Smith had an eyebrow cocked, chin down, wide eyes boring holes through Jonathan over his wide-rimmed glasses. The teen stared at him for a second like a trapped rabbit, then sighed. "It's… complicated. Very. When where you born?"

"Sorry?"

He shook his head. "Never mind. Listen, I've gotta go. My dad will flip if I'm home too late." Not quite the truth, but it got him away so he could find the others. Without waiting for the teacher's response, he turned and went.

"See you tomorrow!" Smith yelled after him.

"May be a little sooner than that," Jonathan muttered once he was out of earshot.

* * *

There was a police box in Bixby.

Dess had seen it nudged in an alley on the way to school. It was an honest-to-goodness 1950s British police box, and it was still there when school got out, so she decided to check it out. A few of the details were wrong: it was made of wood, not concrete, the windows were too small, it looked a little disproportioned, and, oh yeah: It was in Bixby. _Bixby_. Small towns in Oklahoma shouldn't have police boxes, didn't have anyone (save possibly herself) weird enough to pull a prank like this, and no history geeks that would dare leave this thing by a _dumpster_, reenactment gear or not. The phone didn't work, but that was to be expected with the thing showing up overnight(or really, morning. She hadn't seen it there at midnight). Even odder, the doors were locked.

It was weird, and not normal Bixby weird. Just… completely random. She wouldn't have even known what it was if not for the Discovery Channel. At least with midnight, she could figure things out. But the police box wasn't a problem she could solve, it was just…there, like a variable without an equation.

She was thinking through all this; tinkering with Ada when the phone rang. She rushed to get it, desperate for something to get her mind off the box.

"Martinez?"

"Yeah, Dess, it's me."

"What is it?"

"I need to talk to you. Can you meet me at the museum in, say, ten minutes?"

"Yeah, sure."

"Good." He hung up.

Dess smiled. Finally, something was happening.

* * *

Getting a job as a substitute teacher hadn't exactly been what the Doctor had planned to do in Bixby, but if it helped him get to the bottom of things, it seemed like it would be worth it. This was a funny town, Bixby, and it wasn't just what had happened with Martinez that afternoon. There were sets of thirteen everywhere, in the town seal, on doorways, even the town's name. Thirteen was woven into the very fabric of the place.

"Thirteen…" he muttered to himself, tilting his head over the back of the seat to stare at the TARDIS's ceiling. "It's so _odd_. Most of the time, humans go out of their way to _avoid_ thirteen, so why…?"

He shot out of the seat. The words Jonathan said to the cat. The whole situation had been odd, with Jonathan seeming afraid of a simple kitty, but all the words he had said to chase it away (or at least, that's what he seemed to have been doing) had been 13 letters long. So why had the cat been afraid of thirteen-letter words? Was the constant usage of the number to protect from cats?

Ridiculous. Why would a whole city need to protect itself against cats? The whole thing was incredibly superstitious: black cats and the number thirteen. What was going to show up next? Witches?

Not that he hadn't dealt with witches before.

The Doctor only realized he had been pacing when he stopped. He might as well get out and see the sights, not that he was sure there were many in Bixby. But supposedly there was a natural history museum somewhere…

The Doctor smiled. He _loved_ museums.


	2. ActionReaction

A/N: Many, many thanks to those of you who liked this story enough to subscribe. Really, seeing those little alerts in my inbox always makes my day, and encourages me to write more. Also, special shiny thanks to The Capslock Savior and Kiyosaisei Ichimaru for reviewing. Really. If subs are like getting free candy, then reviews are like getting sent free mocha icecream cake to your door by a stranger. Either way, they're yummy. 3

So, new chapter. Enjoy!

* * *

"So let me get this straight: there was a slither walking around the school hallway?"

Jonathan nodded.

"In the afternoon, when there's _sun_, which slithers burst into flame in? And the school hallway, by the way, is lined with steel lockers and high-tech insulation. I can see it getting over the ceramic tile without getting burned, but only if the lights were off, which they weren't."

"I know what I saw, Dess," he said, "It had purple eyes. Not to mention, you know, it ran away when I started spouting tridecalogisms."

Dess sighed.

"Maybe it was a leftover from Samhain. That still doesn't explain how it got in the building," she closed her eyes for a moment, "but maybe that's not what we should be worried about right now."

"What'd you mean?"

"Why would it want to get in the school in the first place? Say it got left behind when the rip sealed, you'd think it would go back to the desert to wait for a chance to get back in the blue time. But it didn't. It went into a school building full of all sorts of new things, after hours, when not many kids where left there, and came up to you and Smith _on purpose_. It was looking for one of you."

Jonathan leaned back and thought for a little bit. "It completely ignored me, but it acted kind of like it wanted Smith to follow it. He thought it was just a normal cat, though; he kept trying to pet it, and it wouldn't let him touch it."

Dess stared at the floor, counting tiles. She already knew that there were 507, because the room was 13' by 39' and every tile was a foot square, but the numbers tumbling through her head helped her think. It sounded a bit like what Jessica had said happened the second time she was in the blue time (and like Cassie, she had to remind herself) , but this whole mess took place _in broad daylight_, which meant that even if it had been a psychokitty, there was no where for it to lure Smith _to_. It made absolutely _no sense_.

God, she was thinking in italics. That had to mean things were bad.

"So maybe Smith's a midnighter?" That hadn't come from her, but from Flyboy. She shoved her ever-present sunglasses further up her nose.

"Yeah, maybe. Either that or you've gone completely off your rocker, which I kind of doubt because it's Madeleine's turn." Jonathan gave her a _look_, so she explained. "Not sure if you've noticed, but we're just _barely _short of enough sanity to go around in our little group. When Melissa finally got the voices she didn't want out of her head, Rex went nutty, and now that he's getting better, Madeleine's a vegetable."

There was a short pause, and Jonathan sighed. "Think Rex would be willing to check him out? I think he dropped; I haven't seen him at school since Samhain. It would be kinda awkward if I went to his house."

Of course. They'd been through the freaking _end of the world_ together, and they still couldn't get along.

She sighed. "I'll see what I can do."

* * *

They found Smith in the museum's front room, staring at the darkling skeleton that the curators had mistaken for an ancient cat. He had glasses, and Dess wondered briefly if he was a seer. He didn't seem to notice them, but it _was_ and odd coincidence that he was here.

Unless it wasn't a coincidence.

Dess shook the thought out of her head before it could take root. There was no logical way he could be here because of them, unless he was some weird kind of super spy that could trace their phone calls.

She hung back in the stairwell down to the basement room they had been talking in and flipped her phone out. Jonathan kept going, but looked back once he realized she was still there.

"Go," she said, "I'll take care of things here. And don't talk to Smith; he's out there looking at the psychokitty bones. I'm gonna call Rex and get him down here." Jonathan nodded and went on his way, and Smith didn't so much as look up.

Rex hadn't come back to school after Samhain, and had officially dropped out after about a week. Dess guessed he spent all his time nursing his adopted vegetables: his dad and Madeleine. He and Melissa were still an item, but Dess didn't really care enough to keep track of them. They had all kind of drifted apart after the long midnight, the crises that had kept shoving them together suddenly absent.

Dess sighed, punched the call button, and held the phone to her ear.

* * *

Rex didn't come to the museum much anymore. It felt so _wrong_, those artifacts in all their sweet oldness trapped behind bulletproof glass, held together with tricky little wires, treated with who knew what to keep them from decay. Bixby's Natural History Museum (and all museums, really) violated the very thing it was trying so hard to preserve.

At least now he was to the point where he could walk into the place unassisted. He didn't like it any more than he had school, but he was at least learning how to shove the darkness inside him to a manageable portion of his brain. He wore sunglasses to help him with fluorescent light now that he didn't need his prescription lenses, his hair was finally growing out a bit, and he had learned how to look less predatory. He still wore gloves, because they were the only way he could touch _new_ things without being burned.

He wasn't sure if "healing" was the right word, but he was getting better. He hoped.

Rex pushed open the big steel-framed glass doors to the museum's front room, squinting at the sunlight that streamed through the windows despite his dark glasses. He spotted the teacher Dess had called him about immediately. The man was burning.

At least, that's what it looked like. The focus that clung to him was like nothing he'd ever seen. It wasn't like midnighters, or the tracks of human innovation he'd been able to see since the change. He was practically _glowing_ with it, radiating sheer wrongness and power and clever ideas that could kill if he got too close.

Rex bristled. The teacher, Smith, felt so…_wrong_. It made his heart hammer; and the darkling part of his brain _screamed_ at the sight of the man. He closed his eyes and turned back to the door, got the hell _away_ so he could calm down and try to figure out what that meant.

He rushed to his car, put his head between his legs, and tried to breathe. That man – if that's what he was; Rex almost doubted that that could have come from someone human – seemed to be made of, to be _seeping_ everything darklings detested. If Dess' little theory was right, if the daytime-slither _had_ been seeking out Smith, it had been to kill him. He was also pretty sure that for any slither to make it that close to the man, it would have to be able to walk through daylight, at the very least. Anything from midnight resilient enough to stand the sight of him would be resilient enough to survive the inside of a modern building, no problem. Compared to Smith, school was a cakewalk.

"What the hell _are_ you?" he whispered to himself, knuckles turning white on the steering wheel above his head. "What's going on?"

* * *

"So," Dess asked when she picked up the phone, "Is he a midnighter?"

Rex gulped, not entirely sure how to answer. "I don't know," he said.

"What do you mean, you don't know? You saw him, didn't you?"

"Yeah, but…" Rex didn't know how to say this. It sounded so _stupid_ in his head: _"Yeah, Dess, I saw him. He was burning. He might not be entirely human, either, just so you know."_

Yeah, right.

Dess was waiting.

"I'll explain it to you at midnight, okay? Meet me downtown, by the park."

He didn't give her time to say no before he hung up.

* * *

The Doctor had seen them. All three of them, in the museum. He was very good at acting like he _didn't_ see things, of course, because it often came in handy. Like today, for instance. Jonathan and that other girl had been in the museum, and when Jonathan left, he walked right past the Doctor without so much as a glance. Judging by the direction he had come from, though, there was no way he couldn't have seen him, which probably meant he was intentionally ignoring his teacher. (Rather rude, that.)

Afterwards, the other girl – Dess, he was pretty sure he had heard Jonathan call her – had whipped out her phone and called up a friend, who he _assumed_, (correctly, he could only hope) was the kid with the dark glasses who had walked in, stared at him, and _bristled_, like a cat that had accidentally run into a pit bull, before walking back out. The Doctor had virtually no idea how those kids were wrapped up with what had happened that Halloween, but he would bet one of his hearts that they had been.

He had actually meant to land _before_ Halloween, but the TARDIS, silly old girl that she was, wouldn't let him. Instead, she'd tossed him to January of the next year, leaving him unable to do anything but piece together what had happened. And he _would_ piece it together, even if doing so was completely futile now. He'd come to Bixby with the intention of saving lives, only to find that when he actually got there, he was three months too late to do anything. The TARDIS, of course, was unrepentant. She was _so_ sure that she had done the right thing by not letting him intervene…

In any case, it turned out his little trip to the museum hadn't been entirely fruitless. He was pretty sure the skeleton of the prehistoric big cat wasn't _exactly_ that. There were some little deviations from real ancient cats, especially in the skull and the proportions of the thing. And although the label _said_ it was a saber-tooth, it had normal, average, kitty-cat teeth, albeit bigger than most cats'. It had supposedly been dug up just outside of Bixby.

So perhaps this hadn't been a normal cat. And if that was the case, maybe the one he ran into earlier wasn't, either.

When no-one was looking, long after the three kids had all left, he shaved a bit of bone off the skeleton's tail. He could tell it wasn't a plaster mold, this, despite the fact that the plaque said it was. After all, the plaque also called the beastie a saber-tooth tiger.

He whistled as he made his way back to the TARDIS to analyze his new find.

* * *

Dess was already on her bike when midnight struck. She was taking Geostationary out to where she found the police box to see if there was anything funky going on with the math. Of course, Geostationary wouldn't work during the blue time, except maybe to chase away slithers. If there had been any slithers, that is. They were all out of town now, except for the stray that Martinez had run into.

Martinez had gotten in touch with Melissa after the museum. She was probably scanning the midnight brainwaves right now for any sign of Smith. Dess wasn't sure she would find him, after all, the chances of _another_ midnighter coming to town were so close to nothing that she didn't even bother calculating. He would have had to been natural-born, too, like Rex, because he was too old to be one of Madeleine's pets. She also seriously doubted he wouldn't know about midnight with what happened at Samhain, even if he was new in town.

She, on the other hand, was _supposed_ to be headed to meet Rex. And she was, kind of, except with a slight detour. She had timed it wrong, though: her calculations were all correct, of course, but her parents had stayed up later than she expected, so she got out of the house about ten minutes late. She had gone as fast as she could, but sometimes good plans failed because of stupid, small things. Like parents. She went to the alley anyway, hoping to get another chance to try to pry open the police box's doors. She could have tried to pick the lock, if she had remembered to bring her lock picks.

She turned the corner to the alley, and what she found made her heart flutter a bit. Another variable had just been discovered. It was a binomial now, this little conundrum.

The police box was gone.


End file.
